Travel Diaries from Norway – Storm in Lofoten Islands

I have never checked the weather as many times in my life as I have been doing during my days in Lofoten. This is my third time on the islands and each time I am here, the weather is always overcast. So what was I expecting? Well – overcast is fine but the rain can get a little disturbing – so I keep checking the weather to see if the rain will go away. Well – it does from time to time and we even get the magic blue hours. As long as there is no rain – the islands are still quite photogenic. Today, I traveled to the southern part of the islands, to the beautiful Moskenes area to base myself in Eliassen Rorbuer located in Hamnoy for five nights. I caught the 9 am bus from Henningsvaer to travel back to Svolvaer where I had to change buses and pick up few pills to ease the flue (it worked!). I then got on a two hours ride down to Hamnoy. The scenery along the road was beautiful and it felt like we were chasing the sun as it always showed up far out there somewhere over the ocean!

Road to Hamnoy

Now the real story starts – while the sun continued to look at me from some very far away place, Hamnoy had greeted me and the two other guests with an incredibly powerful storm! You can check out the video here. It was difficult to walk to my cottage and you had to walk very low to not fall down! However, the views were amazing and I dared to catch few shots right in front of my cottage (what they call “rorbuer” here – rorbuers are basically converted fishermans hunts). Once I settled into my cottage – I had to walk around 30 minutes to go to the only grocery store to get some food but I – once on the bridge – quickly understood that I still slightly underestimated the magnitude of the storm. It was a scary 10 minutes trying to hang on to my camera (my glasses were already in my pocket as they would otherwise be long gone), holding on to the fences hoping they would not fly away (comforting myself that it is Norway and such thing would not happen) and running back to my cottage once the wind calmed down for maybe a minute. Well – I ended up having my food at the cozy and lonely Krambua Restaurant (the only restaurant around here) as I had to wait till the next morning to cross that bridge! You can read the remaining parts of my Norway diaries here.